Program Benefits

The SAP PartnerEdge program is designed to deliver maximum returns for your business. Apply today to start realizing the full benefits of the program.

Unlike many vendor programs, SAP PartnerEdge offers engagement models that fit the way you work and engage with customers – and you’re not limited to one approach. You may wish to adopt our run engagement model at first and expand the partnership to include sell, build, or service models as your business grows. Our standardized fees, consistent benefits, harmonized discounts, and simplified contracts reduce administration and ensure the program grows along with your business and ambitions.

Higher level, bigger benefits

There are two program levels: silver and gold. The silver entry level entitles you to an impressive set of program benefits that increase as you advance to the gold level through our Value Points system. It's simple: the more points, the higher the level and the bigger the benefits.

Points that make prizes

You can earn Value Points for your business performance and competency, and acceleration points for strategic alignment on key topics or solutions. You get recognized for your total business contribution across all the engagement models you've joined and total Value Points determine your program level.

Money for marketing

Partners at the gold level can accrue market development funds as a percentage of SAP software license or subscription sales. You can use this money to pay for qualifying marketing and demand-generation activities, as well as for select services found in our online partner benefits catalog.

Unlimited opportunities

At SAP, we don’t box you in. In fact, we actively encourage our partners to explore and join all our engagement models. Our straightforward program structure makes it easy to try new approaches, while harmonized benefits help ensure that your total contribution across all models counts towards your level and benefits.

Distinguish yourself

You can get valuable logos and branding assets that help you elevate your business, distinguish yourself in the marketplace, and show your customers that you have the power of SAP behind you.

Be recognized as an expert

The SAP Recognized Expertise designation describes a specialization and depth of expertise in an industry, or with an SAP solution, or both. The logo helps differentiate your business from the competition and instills confidence in prospects and customers.

Get on the guest list

As an SAP partner, you’ll gain access to a myriad of events throughout the year. Local and global, in-person or virtual – these events help you build knowledge, network, and promote your business and solutions to SAP customers.

Promote your business on SAP.com

You can gain exposure to the thousands of customers and prospects who visit SAP.com each day. Maintaining your listing on the SAP partner finder tool will help generate interest in your company, solutions, and services.

Partner-first philosophy

Our culture is built around putting you first, because we know your success is good for business – for you, for customers, and for us. Our sales teams are heavily incentivized to work with and through partners – while clear rules of engagement eradicate any potential conflicts.

Help at hand

SAP partner business managers, dedicated SAP partner service advisors, and local SAP marketing directors are all ready to provide help and guidance. Whether you have technical questions, marketing queries, support issues, or need advice to take your business to the next level, our experts will help you make your business the best it can be.

Stay in the loop

We consider partners an extension of internal SAP teams. Keeping you informed about the latest news, tools, and resources is therefore critical to our joint success. Our profile-based newsletter delivers relevant news in a brief and concise format at a frequency of your choosing, while our social media channels keep you abreast of the latest stories as they happen.

Partner Managed Cloud

Whether you deliver solutions that meet the needs of a specific industry or offer cross-industry services, your customers have one thing in common. They want to spend less time building and maintaining IT systems and more time creating superior products and services for their own customers.

SAP partners offer fully-integrated, proven SAP software solutions to manage critical business processes for their customers. These solutions can be delivered using a private cloud-based offering or through one of our public cloud solutions such as SAP Customer Experience, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Concur, or SAP Hybris solutions.

Private cloud

Offer SAP solutions that were previously only available on premise and take them into the cloud. You can extend and develop innovative niche offerings for target markets, bundle your services, and deliver these enterprise-class solutions using your own private managed cloud. For a single, monthly subscription fee for each user, your customers benefit from software, hardware, and support services.

Public cloud

License cloud solutions from SAP that are hosted on our public cloud infrastructure. You can then extend the scope and capabilities of these solutions, enrich them with your own industry and line-of-business expertise, and bundle in your own qualified services. In addition, you can offer implementation, management, and support services to give customers a fully-tailored solution for a single, monthly subscription fee.

All industries are impacted by the digital economy and need new ways to manage the dynamics of rapidly-changing business models, customer demands, and consumption behaviors. Shifting industry economics mean your customers can no longer justify large IT spend or extended time to value. To maintain margins and competitiveness, a flexible IT infrastructure that supports industry best practices is essential.

Benefits of Partner Managed Cloud

Remove cost as a barrier

Customers pay a single monthly or quarterly subscription fee for each user. This includes software, hardware, service, and support – all provided by you to more customers than you ever imagined possible.

Deliver an end-to-end experience

From deployment and application and infrastructure management services to ongoing maintenance and support, and software updates that enable customers to take advantage of our latest technologies.

Build long-term relationships

Become your customers’ trusted advisor as you adapt their software and services to match their changing needs. You can collaborate with other SAP partners or build your own add-on solutions that extend capabilities to fulfill industry-specific and unique needs.

Outsourcing Operations Partners

Tap into the global trend of customers using outsourcing services for SAP products by acquiring SAP Certified status.

Services for IT outsourcing operations are increasingly important to SAP customers that want to ensure high-quality, sustainable, and cost-effective operation of their SAP solutions and environments. As an SAP services partner for outsourcing operations, you can offer a wide range of services, including:

Cloud and infrastructure operations. Offering an infrastructure and cloud services portfolio tailored to SAP customers. Cloud service offerings from providers certified by SAP encompass on-demand infrastructure and on-demand services for SAP products. No SAP operations services are included in the infrastructure services.

Application operations. Offering maintenance, daily operation, and ongoing functional support for SAP business applications. These services can currently be certified for SAP Business Suite, SAP S/4HANA and SAP SuccessFactors solutions.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) operations. Partners offer the full stack of business process outsourcing services based on SAP business applications.

DevOps. Working according to the DevOps principles of flow, feedback and continuous learning with focus on cloud solutions and cloud extensions.

To help ensure ongoing high standards for the management of SAP solutions, certified providers undergo a rigorous assessment of their delivery and support capabilities every two years, conducted by SAP's outsourcing partner certification group. You can become certified either at a local or global level.

Stand out from the crowd with certified services

When your services are certified by SAP, it gives customers confidence that they can trust you with the management of their business-critical IT infrastructure.

Support Standards Customers Trust

All partners participating in the “run” engagement model of SAP PartnerEdge must provide a sufficient standard of support to their customers when delivering SAP solutions. To help ensure the highest possible standards, partners must obtain specific support authorization in the form of Partner Center of Expertise (Partner COE) certification.

Get certified status

Partner COE certification requires up-front investment in staff, infrastructure, and training. You’ll also need a dedicated support hotline, a professional incident management system, support staff with relevant product certifications, and documented processes for customer onboarding, quality, and escalation measurement.

Gain expertise with SAP Solution Manager

Partner COE certification. Centralize management of customers' solutions in a transparent way that helps you implement, operate, and innovate better on their behalf. Become an integrated part of the SAP global support backbone for more efficient collaboration and higher-value support delivery.

Partner Center of Expertise certification must be achieved within six months of program entry and is valid for two years. Your dedicated SAP partner service advisor will explain the entire certification process and will guide you through each step.

Solution Innovation

Our business solution portfolio is comprehensive, but customers still have unique business requirements that represent gaps that need to be filled.

Adding your own intellectual property (IP) is one of the largest opportunities facing partners today. Regardless of partner type, many customers’ cloud solutions benefit from extended functionality that can only be provided through deep expertise in a given industry or line of business. By adding your IP to SAP solutions, you can create faster time-to-value for customers and help them realize greater ROI on their solution investment.

Co-innovation with SAP

Co-innovation with SAP is just one of the services offered by our Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services team. Simply put, it’s a comprehensive program of guided services that are designed to help you productize and take your idea to market. You can walk in with an idea and walk out with a fully-certified and market-ready solution.

Packaged solutions

You can build integrated solutions that combine SAP market-leading software and innovations with industry or line-of-business expertise, specialized services, customizations, configurations, or applications. Built, sold, and supported by SAP partners, these solutions offer rapid time-to-value, low risk, and high predictability.

Our mission is to help customers solve complex problems through innovation. The days of a closed SAP are long behind us and our open application programming interfaces (APIs) allow partners to innovate and extend SAP solutions and technology platforms to help customers realize an intelligent enterprise. In turn, this helps customers do more with less, empower employees through process automation, and delivers a best-in-class customer experience by enabling a proactive approach to customer service. SAP’s partners are uniquely positioned to help customers achieve game-changing results, and this type of diversification can only help you achieve stronger growth.

Get Recognized as an Expert

Stand out among competitors and send a clear and confident message to customers and prospects with an SAP Recognized Expertise designation.

SAP Recognized Expertise designations describe a specialization and depth of expertise in an industry, an SAP solution, or both. To attain a designation, you’ll need to meet specific employee training and certification standards, and demonstrate customer success. Along with other benefits, using the logo for SAP Recognized Expertise can differentiate your business from the competition, demonstrate a high level of competence, and instill confidence in your prospects and customers.

Benefits of the designation

An SAP Recognized Expertise designation not only demonstrates your level of expertise to your customers, but also shows that you have successfully worked with other companies to deliver value in a particular industry or solution area.

Become a recognized expert

To gain the SAP Recognized Expertise designation, your company must clearly demonstrate and meet specific requirements across delivery capability, product competency, and business performance.

Delivery capability

To meet our delivery capability criteria, you must meet or exceed a certain number of customer references or validated projects related to a specific solution or industry.

Product competency

We require that companies achieving SAP Recognized Expertise designation have a number of certified consultants for a specific solution or industry competence. Consultants must have a qualification from our eligible certifications list.

Business performance

You will be asked to provide detailed business development information specific to each expertise. Information required includes go-to-market planning and evidence of successful execution of jointly-defined plans.

Continual monitoring

If you are successful, your SAP Recognized Expertise designation will be valid for one year. We will extend the designation following biannual checks to make sure that all requirements continue to be met.

* You can apply to have your outsourcing and operation services certified independently of the SAP PartnerEdge program. However, we highly recommend you join the “run” engagement model of SAP PartnerEdge to gain access to the full spectrum of program benefits.